1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus and a printing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Printing apparatuses, such as inkjet printers, that are used in computer systems are provided with a printing apparatus main unit, an ink container that can be attached to and removed from the printing apparatus main unit and which contains ink that is supplied to the printing apparatus main unit, a print head provided with ink-ejecting sections, to which the ink container is mounted and which can be attached to and removed from the printing apparatus main unit, and a printing medium, such as roll paper, that can be attached to and removed from the printing apparatus main unit.
In recent years, a need has arisen for printed matter, which is printed by such printing apparatuses, to possess not only a simple quality for printing letters and/or line drawings, but also to possess higher image quality that is on par with silver halide photographs, leading to repeated improvements in the characteristics of the ink and the printing medium and in the arrangement of the ink-ejecting sections provided in the print head. Also, suitability relationships exist between the various types of inks, printing mediums, and print heads, so that it is preferable to print using components that are suitable with one another. For this reason, ink containers, printing media, and print heads come packaged as units provided with storage elements on which information on their characteristics and specifications, for example, is stored. The information is read from the storage elements of the units after they are installed, and if the units are suitable, then printing is possible, however, if they are not suitable, then the user is notified that the units are not suitable.
However, the heightened demand for high-quality images has led to improvements in the ink, the printed media, and the print heads, for example, in shorter times, and the task of most appropriately matching these components to one another has surpassed what can be handled simply by a program stored on the printing apparatus. For example, in a case where a print head with ink-ejecting sections at a narrow spacing is used in order to print at high-density with a small dot-to-dot spacing, it is necessary to not only use ink and printing media that blot little, but also, if for example a single line is to be printed, to change the print control program, including the print driver, for controlling printing so that adjacent dots are not printed sequentially but rather that the printing operation is divided into two operations: a first operation in which dots are printed with a spacing between them and a second operation in which printing to connect the dots is carried out. In this case, there was the problem that the user was forced to carry out the bothersome tasks of not only exchanging the ink unit, the printing medium unit, and the print head unit, but was also required to obtain and install print control programs suited for these units.